Fight Like Apes are a band who have been around as long as this site has. They burst onto the Irish music scene with ‘Lend Me Your Face’ and deflated the flailing singer-songwriter scene as they did so.
Fight Like Apes mixed pop and alternative, pop culture and synthesizers, big shit-eating grins and punk rock (all without using guitars). There weren’t, and still isn’t many bands like them.
Unfortunately, the band found it hard to navigate the choppy waters of the industry and it’s partly the reason why they are calling it a day as they explain below. An alternative band needs support if they are to remain that way and there’s very little support left for bands like them. Their last album was made with the help of a Fundit campaign but you can’t do that repeatedly.
Here’s the band’s statement in full and info on their last three shows.
Stick a fork in us, we’re done.
We’ve been quiet for a while now. We’ve had a lot of thinking and talking to do.
We’d be here all year if we started listing the people we wanted to thank, so we’ll just do that in our own time.You’ll see us all again under different musical guises but, these 3 shows will be Fight Like Apes’ last. We want to call it a day while we’re all still pals and are proud of what we’ve done.
And we are very, very proud.
It’s a deadly time in so many ways to be in a band; you can have so much control over your work if you’re clever; you can release it how and when you like and in our opinion, right now, Ireland is the healthiest it’s ever been in terms of talent and diversity.
But, there are massive challenges for a lot of bands, mostly financial, that make this a tough job and sadly, those obstacles have become too big for us.
I think we all know that we’re going to hear announcements like this more often. A lot of people don’t seem to understand that we can’t keep producing records if you keep not paying for them. Bands are having to sell beautiful albums for €2.99, labels can’t give you as much support since they’re losing income too and our alternative radio stations* are practically non existent now, meaning so many wonderful bands will not get a chance to get played on radio as they’ll be competing with huge pop acts.
Please buy your music in independent record stores or directly from the band.
Don’t fool yourself in to thinking that your £10 subscription to Deezer and Spotify helps us at all. It does not. Look how many bands are on there and do the maths.
Please go to gigs. Please buy merch.
Thanks to all you entirely crazy, wonderful people who have supported us and danced and screamed with us over the past 10 years. We could never thank you enough.
I still can’t believe some of the amazing things we’ve done together and how far we came.
*RIP TXFM. We absolutely adore you and everything you’ve done for music in Ireland.
The band’s last three shows are:
November 24th, The Roisin Dubh, Galway ( Free show )
November 25th, Connollys of Leap, Cork
December 9th – back to where they had their very first gig 10 years ago – Whelans, Dublin.
